Interning at an Early-Stage Startup
My role and key takeaways in an 8 weeks long internship
Why did I want to intern?
After having practiced design as a hobby for a long time involving various side projects and school projects. The natural next step for me was to experience the professional world.
As most work happens with great collaboration it was imperative to put me out there to understand what it feels like to work in teams with people of different skillsets and domains.
Finding an Internship
Since I was studying in an engineering college, I didn't have much of a network in design. The only option was to look through online portals where I found a startup called Marsplay, they were looking for a marketing design intern. Going through their expectations from the role, it felt the right place to apply.
I went ahead with sending my portfolio, which was followed by a design exercise and an eventual office interview. I joined their marketing team as a designer in January 2019, for a period of 8 weeks.
Marsplay is a Community-led commerce platform, envisioned as a platform that provides easy-to-shop fashion advice on ‘What to wear’ and ‘When to wear’.
My Role & Responsibility
1. Designing for External Triggers
A number of external triggers were employed for driving user engagement, i.e, daily/weekly/monthly/occasional challenges.
My role was to create a cohesive set of theme-based design assets for these challenges, keeping in mind —
- Consistency over various touchpoints like social media feed, story, and in-app banners.
- Consistency with the brand image of Marsplay.
- Consistency with the theme of the particular challenge,
for example, ‘styling for summer’👇
2. Providing design assets for offline events
Marsplay was an early-stage startup pushing for hyper-growth, the team regularly organized offline promotional events for visibility. As part of this approach, Marsplay collaborated with Delhi University as the ‘official beauty sponsor’ for their cultural fests held annually.
I provided the following for actualizing the event:
- Digital assets for social media promotion.
- Print assets for a photo booth stall set up in the fest.
Key Takeaways
Being my first exposure to a professional environment there were massive learnings for me —
- Producing good work vs producing good work with deadlines are two different things.
- Participating in planning calendars and pipelining work for ease of execution.
- Understanding the sort of work that goes behind running an app, as even simple things like scheduling notifications is a complete job in itself.
- Being an early-stage startup at the time, we worked from a 4 room apartment this challenged my notion of an office.
- Collaborating with colleagues, reporting my work, attending stand-up meetings were all experiences that counted.
You can view the Behance presentation of my work here.
Hi, this is Sanyam, I think through problems to arrive at a solution, which is engaging and works. If you’d like to get in touch, send me an email at sanyamjain18@gmail.com or tweet to me @sanyamjain97
